In today's digital age, the availability of confidential Personal Identifiable Information (PII) (any data that could potentially identify a specific person or individual), such as usernames, passwords, Social Security Numbers (SSN), Passport or Driver's license numbers, bank account/routing numbers (collectively referred to as “PII data”); or generic user specific data such as building access codes, phone numbers and addresses, need to be saved and remembered for regular day-to-day use. The ubiquitous use of such data presents a challenge where such data needs to be remembered, recorded or stored safely for personal use. This poses a potential problem, where, if such data is saved and stored electronically, is typically prone to malicious attacks and cyber leaks and can significantly compromise a user's identity or lead to identity theft.
In addition, the evolution of most software products from downloadable or multimedia disk storage based products to internet or cloud based products has lead to the need for multiple user access credentials such as login names and passwords. Virtually every business running today, ranging from health-care, banking, utilities, apparel, entertainment, travel, e-commerce, entertainment, etc., provides its users or consumers with some form of Internet or cloud based login portal. This requires a consumer to create their own individual user profile(s) and store important information related to their individual accounts. These types of e-commerce portals, websites or dedicated applications (or “Apps”) most often require a user to create a unique login name and password combination to access them. For example, a user may have a health-care, banking or travel profile account (e.g., health insurance App, WELLS FARGO App, SouthWest Airlines App, etc.) that is accessible using a unique username/password combination. With many such portals, websites and apps that relate to a wide range of businesses, frequently the login username and password requirements (such as the combination of type of characters, special characters and numbers that can be used) are varying and are based on the login credential requirements set by the portal creator or administrator. This creates an inconvenience where users have to often remember various (multiple) different user logins/password combinations to access each of their different accounts.
The second challenge presents itself due to need to frequently recollect the abovementioned PII data. To address these hurdles, users often use different methods such as keeping multiple small variations of the their primary or master password, hand-written notes in their personal diary or photographs and copies of their credit cards, SSN numbers, banking account numbers etc. Alternatively, there are tools, utilities, products or specific smartphone applications (“Apps”) [1] [2] [3] [4] that act as data vaults and allow a user to store all their data in one single place or on the cloud where their data is protected by security measures such as a single master or primary password, sophisticated encryption algorithms and other fail safe methods designed to prevent unauthorized users from gaining access to the user data [3] [4]. However, all these approaches require the user to provide their entire or complete PII data or username/password combination(s). There are other authentication methods that involve the use of “passdoodles” [5], “doodling” [6] or “scribbles” [7] for saving passwords or for the use of graphical passwords. However, these methods are primarily authentication techniques based on the similarity or comparison of the stored picto-graphical data with the user's real time inputs. This fundamentally still requires the need for the user's original PII data to be recorded or saved, in order to authenticate.
The above techniques present a security risk where in-spite of all the advances in encryption and security, a data breach could potentially result in the compromise of all user personal data that could be used in a malicious way. This particular inventive method aims to solve these challenges by using audio-visual cues, human memory cognition and anchoring to simply help the user remember their original PII data, as opposed to requiring a user to input and save it “as-is”. This would make it significantly harder for malicious attacks and the possibility of breach of sensitive data by offering an alternate solution to help remember confidential PII data using a unique combination of pictures, text, sounds, scribbles, or glyphs to overcome the drawbacks in the prior art.